15th Annual Summit Awards Awardees

SSSBA’s 15th Annual Summit Awards were held at the elegant Idlewild Country Club in Flossmoor, Il. on February 8th, 2017. A capacity crowd gathered to recognize and honor this year’s four awardees for their outstanding business achievements. They enjoyed great networking, a tasty breakfast, door prizes, and a pertinent and informative presentation by Mark Scholl.

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The Annual Summit Awards honor leading business people and organizations who have contributed to the economic and cultural growth of the region. Each of the awardees is carefully selected from the many businesses and organizations in the region for their outstanding performance and excellence in their qualifying category.

Training Excellence of the Year Award recognizes businesses that are striving to maintain and upgrade their employees’ skills, contribution to the community or others, value added from the training process to their business and recognition of being ready for new or changing technologies or processes.Awardee:Sterling Lumber Co., Phoenix, IL. Click for more info.

Creative Arts Award acknowledges the ability to offer top-caliber talent to the community, the use of local talent representing the diversity of the communities it serves, demonstration of continued growth and success as an organization and its willingness to engage in collaborative efforts with other creative arts organizations.Awardee:The Drama Group, Chicago Heights, Il. Click for more info.

Keynote Presentation: Cybersecurity Threats, Trends, and Strategies for Small Businesses

Small and medium sized businesses have become attractive and profitable targets for cyber criminals. New technologies have changed how we run our businesses and service our customers. As a result, many organizations face new and advanced threats to the confidentiality and availability of your critical data. You can’t protect your digital information unless you know what you are up against. Cyber crime has evolved to more targeted attacks leading to account takeover, financial scams, point-of-sale attacks, and even extortion.
This presentation will cover some of the most common cyber threats, what you can do to prevent becoming a victim, and how to respond if your data has been compromised.

Keynote Speaker: Mark Scholl, Illinois Market Leader, Wipfli, LLP

Mark Scholl, Partner at Wipfli CPAs and Consultants, Information Technology – Sterling, Illinois. With over 28 years of technology experience, Mark specializes in all aspects of technology services for the firm, primarily in the financial institutions industry, including cyber security and perimeter vulnerability assessments, IT risk assessments, network design and support, and IT training. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars on various information technology topics. Mark is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH).